Secrets of King Tut’s Tomb Revealed Online

King Tut’s First Gig As A Stand-up Comic,Batman Confidential #26 (April 2009).(Image Courtesy of Wikipedia.)

In 2009, almost 90 years after the discovery of his final resting place (and over 3,000 years after his burial) the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun was still famous enough to inspire a comic book villain and a traveling exhibition of relics from his tomb. He’s so familiar that he’s known by a nickname, “King Tut.” But one Egyptologist believes that although we think we know all about our favorite Pharaoh, in fact his tomb still holds many mysteries.

Jaromir Malek is an archivist at one of the finest Egyptology libraries in the world, the Griffith Institute, located in the basement of the Sackler Library at the University of Oxford. The prize collection here contains the notes, diaries, and photographs of Howard Carter, the Englishman who discovered King Tut’s tomb in 1922. Amazingly, when Malek began working at the institute, he learned that fewer than one-third of the artifacts recovered from the tomb had been adequately studied and documented. This was a situation he found “unacceptable,” so he began a project to “make sure that all of the excavation records are available to anyone who is interested.”

Malek began his database, Tutankhamun: Anatomy Of An Excavation, in 1993. It was an inspired idea, but also a huge undertaking. A total of 5,398 objects were found in the tomb. The artifacts themselves are located at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, but Carter’s notes and photographs were donated to the Griffith Institute, and nearly forgotten. And we’re not talking about just a couple of spiral notebooks: Carter documented his finds on more than 3,500 densely written cards. And more than 1,000 images of the excavation were taken by the expedition’s photographer, Harry Burton. There were also close to 60 maps and plans of the excavation site, and hundreds of pages in Carter’s journals and diaries. Adding to the difficulties, many of these items were extremely fragile.

Howard Carter, On Left, Overseesthe Removal of Artifacts From King Tut’s Tomb.Photo By Harry Burton.

As of July 2010, about 98% of the archive has been posted online. And this despite the fact that, due to lack of funding, Malek and his colleagues had to do the entire project in their spare time. Malek believes the are several reasons why so much of Howard Carter’s documentation has been neglected by scholars. The sheer size of the find was daunting: Carter spent nearly 10 years cataloging it. And Carter died in 1939, only seven years after the excavation was completed, before he could publish all of his writings. “He started working on the final publication, but he was physically and mentally exhausted after a very hard 10 years,” says Malek.

Malek decided that the only way to be sure Carter’s discoveries were studied was to post the entire archive online. “We can’t make Egyptologists work on the material if they are not inclined to do so,” he says. “But we could make sure that all of the excavation records are available … then there will be no excuse.” Malek not only wants to bring the archive to the general public, but also hopes to put “moral pressure” on Egyptologists, to goad them into studying this momentous collection. “Tutankhamun’s is the only royal tomb… that wasn’t gutted by [grave] robbers. If we want to know what an Egyptian pharaoh took with him to the afterlife,” he says, “it’s the only one we can look at. John H. Taylor, who looks after the Egyptian mummies collection at the British Museum in London, agrees. “A lot of the objects will be very unfamiliar to people. What is needed is for schools and people with a more general interest to have access to the basic data and see what’s there.”

André Veldmeijer of the PalArch Foundation in Amsterdam describes the online archive as “one of the best things in Egyptology”. He has firsthand knowledge of the value of the original photographs taken of the exhumation. Carter and his colleagues, he states, “were the first to see the objects, and therefore saw them in the best condition possible.” Veldmeijer looked to the online archive to help him with a study of the shoes found in the tomb. A trip to Cairo revealed that a pair of sandals from the excavation had deteriorated into “an oozing black mess.” In the Carter photographs, the same pair was shown in pristine condition, with the leather, gold leaf, and beadwork intact. “It’s a good example of how you can get so much more from archaeological research,” he notes. “So many excavations have not been properly published.”

Jaromir Malek believes that the photographs and letters he has scanned into the online archive are the only documents which show the tomb as it was upon discovery. “It seems like just a pile of things, but there is a system…you can see what the thinking behind it was. Nothing in the tomb was accidental. We will not be able to understand the tomb as a unit until all of the objects are properly explained.” He hopes the archive’s documents will be studied by both scholars and curious armchair archaeologists. “This doesn’t belong to Egyptologists only, or even to Egypt only. Everybody should have the right to see what’s there.”